Years ago, I began the search for the perfect browser. First, I thought it was firefox. Clean, efficient, and a fox made of fire. But firefox has a huge flaw: other people enjoy it.
Most of you don't know me, but I can't bring myself to enjoy something other people enjoy. So I turned away from firefox, my beloved, to find a more hipster browser.
I remember when chrome came out. At the time, combining the address bar and the search bar was revolutionary. But I couldn't hop on the Chrome bandwagon; other people were there. So I continued to watch Chrome from the shadows, never even bothering to install it.
So what could I do? How about Opera? Opera is THE hipster browser. If I want a hipster browser, this one blows firefox out of the water. But it's just to OBVIOUS. Everyone knows what it is. What it does. That it's hipster. So I passed on it.
What then? Firefox beta? Screams "tech geek", sure, but not "hipster with a false sense of superiority." So no. Waterfox? Well since exactly none of you know what Waterfox even is, it seems good. But my laptop isn't 64 bit and I don't use the desktop for the Internet if I can avoid it. Arora? Hipster, sure, but lacking in features.
Then, I found what I thought was it. Rockmelt. Oh Rockmelt, you sweet firefox variant with seamless facebook integration. The real strength of facebook integration, somewhat counter-intuitively, is that you never have to look at facebook ever again. Proud of my new browser, I instantly went to the Internet to brag about it.
Slowly but surely, I realized that people had heard of Rockmelt. It wasn't this big secret. I was just ignorant. I considered sticking with a browser I liked regardless of popularity... but using a rational basis for browser selection over baseless popularity is a sign of weakness! So I moved on.
I went through the darkest depths of old, obscure and forgotten browsers. The NetScape clones everyone rejected out of the gate. The strangest and most perverse firefox variants. Different models of chrome. Then... I found it. I updated it, ran it and knew, just knew, the search was over. I'd found it. The most hipster browser of all time. The granddaddy of all hipster browsers. The search was over. I had won victory over the Internet.
I loved Internet Explorer.